Documents / Report
The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert was published by Headquarters United States Air Force in 1995. The Black Vault distributes this copy. It reproduces the report by Col. Richard L. Weaver and the synopsis by 1st Lt. James McAndrew, both written after a General Accounting Office inquiry requested by Representative Steven Schiff. The Air Force search found no evidence of an extraterrestrial craft or crew. It concluded that the Roswell debris most likely came from NYU Flight No. 4, a Project MOGUL balloon train.
“The Advance”9 pages
Flight 79: Released from Alamogordo, New Mexico, 1614 MST, July 23, 1948 Recovered at Alamogordo, New Mexico
This was the third attempt to use a coated nylon balloon, sealed off with a valve in the bottom. From Figure 32, the height-time curve, it may be seen
Figure 32
that this balloon did not remain aloft very long but that a high degree of superheat was generated in the lifting gas, despite the aluminum coating of the balloon.
The automatic ballast controls included in the flight equipment were inoperative, and as soon as the balloon lost its initial excess buoyancy (corresponding to the super-pressure maintained behind the safety valve) it descended. From the speed of the descent it was computed that an accelerating force equal to 5% of the gross load (52 kg) was acting to bring the balloon down. This force was in turn derived from the loss of lift encountered when over $ 3 0^{\circ} \mathrm{C} $ of superheat was lost by ventilation. Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 882 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.